Introduction

For the last thirty years, the United States has been in the process of developing a new form of arbitration to address large-scale legal claims. The device - known alternatively as class arbitration, classwide arbitration or class action arbitration - transplants many of the procedures used in judicial class actions into the arbitral context and resolves anywhere from dozens to hundreds of thousands of individual claims in a single proceeding. Although the mechanism has met with some criticism, it has also experienced unprecedented growth during the last decade. Other nations ...